FAMILY RESEARCH REPORT	Journal of the Family Research Institute Founded 1982
20th Anniversary Banquet Huge Success!			Vol. 17 No. 5 Aug-Sep 2002

Let me begin by saying that I blame two institutions for the breakdown of morality in our society — the Christian Church and the Republican Party.

When the Apostles gathered in Rome to determine the rules for admitting Gentiles to the faith, they reviewed the religious practices of Judaism and determined that Gentiles would not be required to observe the dietary laws, nor would the men have to submit to circumcision. However Peter and his followers did insist that new converts obey one rule: No sex outside of marriage.

There are profound reasons why they drew the line at promiscuity. Yet today, mainline Christian churches are telling congregations all over the country that premarital and extramarital sex can be spiritually rewarding — whether heterosexual or homosexual. For every member of the Christian clergy who speaks out in favor of biblical morality, there are three who denounce him as a bigot, a hypocrite, and a hate-monger.

When I was a child, the church was an active and highly visible force in defining the nation’s morality. For example, the Catholic League of Decency was so powerful that the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America established its own Production Code and compelled its members to operate within the rules.

The first General Principle of that Code read: “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.”

Dr. Thomas Landess hands distinguished service award to Dr. Paul Cameron

As for sex, the Code said this about Scenes of Passion: “Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown.”

On the question of homosexuality, the Code was quite clear: “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.”

One organization of one church was responsible for this code. By the same token, all churches today are responsible for the content of movies and television shows — if only because they have done little or nothing to promote public morality.

As for the Republican Party, in representative democracy, if the two-party system is working properly, one party is forever calling for social and political change and the other is forever defending tradition and the status quo. Ideally, out of the tension between the two, grows good government. The people decide which laws or conventions need to be scrapped and which should be preserved, choosing whichever party is more likely to implement their will.

The Democratic Party has held up its end. It is the party of change — the party that is now questioning the very moral foundation on which civilization itself has always rested. Indeed, its leaders have been so effective that, as a people, Americans no longer endorse the sanctity of marriage, the humanity of the unborn, or the outlawing of sodomy. President Clinton, both in his official actions and in his personal behavior, epitomized his Party’s attack on the basic principles that have, until recently, undergirded American society.

On the other hand, President Bush the Elder, when asked by a reporter whether he approved of the Episcopal Church ordaining lesbians, replied that he wasn’t quite ready for that. This statement summarizes the attitude of the Republican Party as a whole: “Give us time. We can adjust to anything, however outrageous or perverse.” The adjustment continues under the current administration.

So we can’t look to churches or politicians to restore our society to health — not at this late hour. Things have gone too far. If we’re to be saved at all, it will be by the efforts of individuals and private groups like Paul Cameron and Family Research Institute — people willing to spend their lives engaged in what now appears to be a hopeless struggle against the irresistible roll of history.

Paul has fought the good fight for 20 years now — and for his efforts, he has earned the contempt of fellow professionals and the hatred of organized perversity. Family Research Institute, always under-financed, has survived only by the generosity of a small number of donors who understand the importance of its work. In the scramble to win approval from the gay rights movement and the mainline media, other conservative organizations have sometimes distanced themselves from Paul and FRI.

Yet as someone who taught at the university level for 24 years, I recognize that the quality of his work meets the highest academic standards. To put it simply: He has published more genuine scholarship in refereed professional journals [on this topic] than anyone on the planet earth. In fact, he stands alone among conservatives in this respect. Most of the material produced by other pro-family groups and individuals — however well-intentioned — is ill-researched and poorly presented. (In some cases, it would be damaging to our cause if the other side weren’t so intellectually slack.) I have worked with Paul enough to know just how exacting he is — how intellectually honest. In compiling and analyzing data, he never hides or distorts the other side. As a consequence, no one has ever disproved what he has written. (A few years ago, FRI published a refutation of an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and several other professional organizations. Spokesmen for these organizations wrote the learned journal where the article was published and said they were drafting a reply. It’s been six years now — we’re still waiting.)

But Paul’s meticulous scholarship reveals only one side of his personality — one facet of his talents. He is also imaginative, innovative, and brazen. Let me offer three illustrations.

A few years ago, a study appeared that, for many professionals as well as laypeople, seem to prove that homosexuality was an inherited characteristic — an inborn appetite. The study had been funded by the National Institutes for Health. In fact, the researchers commandeered a laboratory in the National Cancer Institute — thereby using space, personnel, and funds specifically allocated for cancer research. The study was touted on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers; and its chief researcher, Dean Hamer, appeared on such programs as Nightline.
In their effort to further the agenda of the gay rights movement, the producers agreed not to allow discussion of the fact that Hamer had left his wife and daughter to cohabit with his homosexual lover. Off camera, he was open in his advocacy of gay rights, bragging before a homosexual activist group that the news media would print anything he told them to.

An appreciative crowd of over 200 listens in the Banquet Hall

Certainly they publicized his study. This was the smoking gun the gay rights groups had been waiting for. At that point, one researcher in the Washington area — suspicious of the results — slipped into the Hamer laboratory and began to question a member of his research team. Had she actually seen the raw data? No, Hamer had presented his fellow researchers with the figures. How did she know he didn’t falsify them? Well come to think of it, she didn’t know that. Why do you suppose he and he alone had access to these data? A good question.

About that time, someone rushed into the laboratory and hustled the question man out the door. Shortly thereafter the word leaked out: Someone on Hamer’s team had accused him of falsifying the data. A scandal was brewing. Hamer was transferred elsewhere. Little more was said about the study. Of course there were no front-page news stories; and Ted Koppel didn’t revisit the study in the wake of these charges. The name of the researcher who slipped through the NIH defenses was Paul Cameron. If you don’t hear the Hamer study cited today as final proof that homosexuality is a natural tendency, you can thank him.

When Paul was gathering data for his report on the lifespan of homosexuals — one of the most brilliantly devised studies ever published on homosexuality — he traveled around the country, going through the obituaries of gay rights publications. In Denver, he called up one of the gay newspapers to determine whether or not they published death notices. During the course of the conversation, the editor realized who he was and asked him point blank. Paul told the truth, and the man hung up on him. So how could Paul gain access to the information he needed?

Later that day, a man walked into the newspaper office and held up a card. I CAN’T SPEAK. I WOULD LIKE TO EXAMINE YOUR PAPER’S OBITUARIES TO SEE IF ANY OF MY FRIENDS ARE IN IT. The staff immediately hauled out their entire backlog of issues, and the man sat down at a table and began to take notes. An hour or so later, he looked up to see a man walking in the door. He was a gay rights activist from Washington who knew Paul by sight. Paul held the paper in front of his face and kept on taking notes. When he walked out of the place, he had every obituary catalogued and coded. He was about to call out “Thanks” as he left but resisted the temptation.

For years, the Centers for Disease Control [CDC] has run a National Household Survey of Drug Abuse — a study that asks more than 18,000 Americans from all walks of life about their drug and alcohol use. In order to gauge the impact of substance abuse on everyday life, the researchers ask the respondents a number of questions: Had they experienced mental illness? Had they been convicted of a crime? Did they post good or bad attendance records at work? Did they have good or bad driving records? And many more. In 1996, in order to get a current read on the AIDS epidemic, the CDC made the mistake of including 25 questions on sexual behavior. With whom did the respondents have sex? How many partners did they have? Were they involved with prostitution? Maybe they forgot about the other questions on the survey — the ones involving crime and mental illness and alcoholism and drug abuse. Maybe they believed the propaganda of gay rights activists and thought homosexuals led normal healthy lives. When the results were tabulated, they were appalled. Here, in fact, was the smoking gun that pro-family, pro-Christian traditionalists had been looking for. The CDC decided not to release it. Later they reneged, but refused to send out hard copies. It appeared as if our side would never know about the study. However, Paul Cameron saw a reference to the study in a footnote, his son, Kirk, downloaded it from the Internet, and we have just completed a book-length manuscript which will counter virtually all the false claims of normalcy and made-up statistics put forth by the gay rights movement — if it ever gets published.

Perhaps the most crucial battle FRI fights year after year is the struggle for the minds and affections of the nation’s children. The gay rights movement has captured our educational system. What is happening in our classrooms, behind closed doors, is pure indoctrination. As the point man for sex education in the U.S. Department of Education for the better part of six years, I can tell you what’s going on there:

• Programs that tell children unequivocally they can choose to have sex without unwanted consequences; that their churches and parents know nothing about the subject; that homosexuality is normal, natural, and healthy;
• Junior high school programs that present color slides of naked homosexual couples engaged in every conceivable act — the most popular of these programs developed and published by the Unitarian Church;
• Attacks on orthodox religion as ignorant, superstitious, homophobic, and hateful;
• The citation of rigged studies and manufactured statistics to prove that homosexuals are born with their appetites, that they comprise 10 percent of the population, that they are no more likely than heterosexuals to commit crimes, or use drugs, or experience mental illness, or encounter difficulties in the workplace. All of these assertions are demonstrably untrue.

My 12-year-old daughter came home one day in tears. An animal lover, she hadn’t yet accepted the fact that every living thing survives by feeding on some other living (or recently dead) thing. She’d seen a snake slithering across the road with a baby mouse in its mouth, the tiny tail still visible. The mama mouse came running after the snake — frantic, squealing, trying to rescue her offspring despite the enormous size of the snake.

The United States of America — the most powerful nation in the world — is afraid of the snake. It would rather let the snake gobble up its children than fight the mass media, endure the name-calling of the gay rights movement, or be denounced from the pulpits of a thousand mainline churches.

No political party that allows American children to be indoctrinated by the homosexual movement deserves to govern.

No nation that permits such widespread corruption of its young deserves to survive.

Rep. Bob Dornan gives the keynote address

Paul Cameron and FRI have fought this fight as well, not only in the research they’ve conducted, but in personal appearances before school boards. In Fairfax County, Virginia, when concerned parents were being battered by school board members and the gay sex educator they had hired, Paul came before the board with the only kind of authority that will ever intimidate these people — the authority of science. For those few moments, parents heard an authoritative voice supporting the values they had come to defend, the kind of thinking they had been told was ignorant, irrational, and outdated. Let him appear before every school board in the country, and parents could sleep better at night.

But that isn’t going to happen, is it?

Certainly, I am not optimistic. While I am well aware that all things are possible to the Holy Spirit, I see very little evidence that He is messing around in our internal quarrels. Only Paul Cameron, Family Research Institute, and a few other undaunted underdogs. We have it on the best Authority that the Church will endure — that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. That is surely comforting.

But the Good Lord says nothing about the survival and triumph of the United States of America. I am convinced that if this nation is to endure, it will do so because of the lonely and dedicated service of people like Paul Cameron and organizations like FRI. And right now we’re vastly outnumbered. In fact, the enormous power of other side is intimidating.

Given what C.S. Lewis called “that hideous strength,” we can guess who our enemy really is — and what high stakes we play for. Right now we are losing battle after battle. Many people think we have lost the War. But it isn’t over yet. Not when the Adversary hates us so fiercely and wants to destroy the very memory of the crucified King we serve. The fact that we are gathered here tonight means we are still in the battle, still have a fighting chance.

Corner

Thank You to All Our Supporters!

What a bash! Thank you to everyone who made the effort to come to our 20th anniversary banquet. And thanks to Bob Dornan and Tom Landess, who gave first-class addresses to the crowd of well-wishers.

When we started 20 years ago we had a dream: “if we tell the truth about human sexuality and drug abuse, and publish those findings in the scientific literature, we could change the world for the better.” I thought that our scientific findings would stimulate other traditionalists, particularly those at Christian colleges and universities, to also do original research and publish their findings in scientific journals. After all, one small band of scientists can only do so much. And scientific journals are the ‘scripture’ of our era.

Well, I was wrong on one major count — almost no traditionalist scholars have joined our ranks. For whatever set of reasons, although traditionally-minded scholars have often used our work, with almost no exceptions, if original research from the traditionalist perspective is published, FRI has done the publishing.

Drs. Kirk and Paul Cameron flank Rep. Dornan

Most of the organizations one might think would join FRI in empirically validating traditional values have not. The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) has retreated to the narrow pursuit of ‘the right to deliver clinical services’ to those engaging in homosexuality... well, at least to those who want such therapy. The Christian schools continue to shy away from empirical sexuality research of any kind (with a slight exception regarding the effects of ‘abstinence education’). And the pro-family organizations have pretty-much been content to make their political and media presence felt.

Thanks to my lovely wife, Ginny. My co-workers, especially my son, Kirk. And the support of my family — Kim, Karyn, Joe, Kelly, and Larry. With their support and your help, FRI soldiers on. We will not stop our efforts to build an empirical foundation of truth. I encourage you to visit the Web at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80, look under PubMed, and type in ‘homosexuality’ in the search engine. You will see our presence.

The good news is this: FRI is ‘still in the water’ and reaching ever more policy makers with its scientific reports. It is not likely that we alone can stem the pro-gay tide, but you never know. Stranger things have happened in the course of human affairs.

Family Research Report critically examines empirical data on families, sexual social policy, AIDS, drug addiction, and homosexuality, digging behind the 'headlines' and breaking new scientific ground.

FRR is published 8 times/year by the Family Research Institute.

Dr. Paul Cameron, Publisher
Dr. Kirk Cameron, Editor

Subscriptions: $25/yr ($40 foreign)

©2002
Family Research Institute

P.O. Box 62640
Colorado Springs, CO 80962-2640
(303) 681-3113

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